As we journey together through Lent, Christians throughout Columbia will be sharing their own beautifully written personal meditations. Each will be accompanied by a corresponding scripture reading, and be linked to that passage in the Holy Bible. If you would like to join us on Columbia’s Lenten journey, please submit your personal meditation by email. Especially meaningful submissions will be printed. Let us continue our Lenten journey, day by day, to its glorious culmination on Easter Sunday.
Scripture reading: John 6:27-40
What are you seeking? Will you recognize it when you find it? In this passage from John, Jesus asks these questions of the crowd who has followed Him. He ends the passage with the wondrous promise, “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in Him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”
If I put myself in that crowd, how might I have answered? Those in the crowd had not grown up in an Episcopal Sunday School. They did not have a creed they had memorized from saying it over and over each Sunday in church. The security of time-honored traditions and social acceptance were not surrounding and supporting them. I fear that, had I been in that crowd, I would have been hesitant at best – downright skeptical, most likely.
What are you seeking? A set course of work that will lead to a certain future? Some clear sign that you are right and are on the right track?
In verse 36 Jesus says to the crowd, “But I say to you that you will have seen me and yet do not believe.” Would I have recognized what I was seeing? I wish I could truthfully answer that question.
How hard it is to really recognize what is most important. As the poet Wordsworth said, “Getting and forgetting lay waste our powers.”
Perhaps we can find the key in the first verse of the passage: Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on Him that God the Father has set His seal.
What really lasts is not what we get and forget. What lasts is, I believe, how we treat others, for it was how Jesus treated the people around Him that those in the crowd had seen and were drawn to.
Connie Britt
Trinity Cathedral
Columbia, South Carolina
You might also like to read:
- Bible Verse of the Day
- Daily Bible Guide
- Growing in Christ
- Bible Study Tools Online
- The Jesus Walk Bible Study Series
A discussion of today’s Lenten meditation is encouraged. If you would like to participate, please feel free to write a comment in the space below. There are many different outlooks and interpretations of scripture passages and, the more we share, the more we learn.
Sharon is a member of the Community Church of the Midlands that meets at Seven Oaks Community Center at 200 Leisure Lane in Columbia and is a frequent participant, with her husband Douglas, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral located at 1100 Sumter Street in Columbia.
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If you enjoyed this article, you can find more at Sharon's Columbia Biblical Studies Examiner homepage.
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